Home of Ardor

Money money

2009-05-04T15:28:00.001-06:00

Stocks are good! Even Ocean Freight is up today. If you look around it seems that the economy is done collapsing. Now is the time to survey the wreckage and take a piece for yourself. The next generation of wealth is being created right now.

Astronomers Astonished by 'Monstrous' Star Explosion

2007-05-07T19:45:00.001-06:00

Astronomers Astonished by 'Monstrous' Star Explosion:
The newly detected ‘king’ of supernovas might be evidence of a new way massive stars die.

Ugh, a month and no updates. But this one's still a good read.

The Top 21 Tech Flops

2007-04-05T15:43:00.001-06:00

The Top 21 Tech Flops:
Excerpt
PetManimal writes "Whatever happened to Digital Audio Tape? Or Circuit City's DIVX program? Or IBM's PCjr. and the PS/1? Computerworld's list of 21 biggest tech flops is an amusing trip down the memory lane of tech failures. Some are obvious (Apple Newton), while others are obscure (Warner Communications' QUBE). Strangely, Y2K didn't make the list."
Yup, this is the stuff that we like to watch die. Most of it died by demand. Thankfully.

Review: Apple appalls where Xbox excels (AP)

2007-04-04T15:17:00.001-06:00

Review: Apple appalls where Xbox excels
(AP):
AP - Apple Inc. has graced the public with another smooth, white, exquisitely designed gadget, this time aiming at making it easier to play iTunes movies and songs on the living-room TV set.

This ended up being a really good article. I also agree, the itunes videos look horrible when you scale up the res because they are barely (and even arguably) dvd resolution. Why in the WORLD did Apple even BOTHER with the pitch that the AppleTV was a high def device when there is NO HD content?

Then they move on to the Xbox 360's Xbox Live Video Marketplace. Long name, but the quality is great. Fantastic actually. Even the pilot episode of MacGyver was encoded with minimal grainy artifacts. The files are not gratuitously large and the video is as crystal clear as they could make it, both in HD and SD. For any tv shows available via the 360, that's my choice over iTunes any day. I'll stop chattering and vote with my wallet.

Say NO to DRM! Go EMI music!

2007-04-02T16:03:00.001-06:00

EMI ditches DRM on iTunes

Bravo bravo. Kudos, especially to the EMI folks who made this deal happen. I for one am hugely excited by this and will promptly upgrade all my EMI tracks once this is available. I will also be encouraged to buy more music.

You should be too. This is one of the "Big 4" music companies that has had a change of heart that was VERY positive for consumers. The quality increase and lack of DRM is a great step. I will support further steps like this with my $$. Let the dollars speak for you too, buy EMI music!

This was a great announcement, and great coverage from Engadget too.

News: Remember a Previous Life? Maybe You Have a Bad Memory

2007-04-01T20:04:00.001-06:00

News: Remember a Previous Life? Maybe You Have a Bad Memory:

This is a fascinating article that combines information from a few studies and evidences that people who remember "past life experiences" are in actuality distorting a bad memory somehow.

Excerpt:
In other words, people who believe they had previous lives are committing a source-monitoring error, or an error in judgment about the original source of a memory. (In this case, they are misremembering the source—themselves—of nonfamous names.) This is important because source-monitoring mistakes are the first in a sequence of events that psychologists believe lead to false memories.

Halliburton provided contaminated water to Soldiers [video]

2007-03-31T21:54:00.001-06:00

Haliburton managed to extort billions of our dollars from this country. Only to turn and high tail it back to Dubai once the political situation became too unfavorable. Talk about unpatriotic, patriotism would be throwing the Haliburton executives through the meatgrinder over issues like this.Very sad video, mainly because it just illustrates with no doubt that we are allowing a truly horrible evil to take place.

read more | digg story

Report: Flaming Piece of Space Junk Misses Airliner

2007-03-28T16:09:00.001-06:00

Report: Flaming Piece of Space Junk Misses Airliner:
Excerpt:
SANTIAGO, Chile (AP) - Pilots of a Chilean commercial aircraft approaching the Auckland airport in New Zealand spotted flaming pieces of a satellite falling past their jet, the LAN Chile airline reported Wednesday.

This is just wild, space barely misses the airliner. Seems to be from a Russian satellite.

Fix health care. Raise taxes? Are they insane?

2007-03-28T15:57:00.001-06:00

Fix health care. Raise taxes:
Excerpt
John Edwards says we need to raise taxes to fix health care, and you can bet that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton will eventually say so too. Their red-blooded Republican foes will counter that raising taxes is always and everywhere evil, because it hurts the economy.

*Cringe*

ARGH! No do NOT raise taxes to fix healthcare. If anything LOWER taxes, reduce entitlements, and move the government OUT of healthcare. Many providers are challenged by the increased entitlements given by the Medicare program due to one simple fact: Medicare often reimburses providers less than the costs of the services, and they have to take outrageous contract adjustments to meet the contracted rates. Thus HURTING the providers that participate. Now Edwards wants to make the problem worse!

Simple fact: Hospitals and Doctor offices that accept Medicare subsidize the losses taken by Medicare accounts across the rest of their accounts. The electric bill needs paid, the nurses need paid, the coding staff need paid, the maintenance guys need paid, and of course the doctors need paid. If all they got was paid by Medicare/government, the money coming in would not be enough to cover the bills and salaries. The solution is to reduce the ability to serve patients and gut their staff to a bare minimum overworked skeleton crew.

The way it works now is that everyone can get paid by the sources that DO pay. This is why your health insurance premiums are going up all the time, our wonderful Medicare and Medicaid systems.

Aged, Frail and Denied Care by Their Insurers

2007-03-25T21:34:00.000-06:00

Aged, Frail and Denied Care by Their Insurers:
That this is news is really surprising. Having worked in the health finance field for a few years...I can attest to the FACT that prices are not rising with premiums. That and denial reasons have multiplied. Many maternity benefits now require notification within the first trimester or the insurance will not cover any claims associated with the pregnancy. Four years ago the majority of health plans only required notification of the child for dependent care within 30 days after birth.

Excerpt:
Many long-term-care policyholders say that years of premiums have resulted in only excuses about why insurers will not pay.

South Park Studios: No Walk in the Park

2007-03-25T17:09:00.001-06:00

South Park Studios: No Walk in the Park:

This is actually a neat article on Apple's website about the South Park studio. It talks about how they moved from construction paper to SGI workstations. It also details the obligatory "Mac's are great" mantra of moving from SGI workstations to Macs using Maya, Photoshop, and Motion to basically do the entire show in about 6 days.

Excerpt:
Keeping it fresh is critical at long-running Comedy Central favorite South Park, where regular 120-hour work weeks and a studio full of Macs allow just-in-time delivery of over-the-top satire.

Flying the Airbus A380

2007-03-25T09:53:00.001-06:00

Flying the Airbus A380:

There was one interesting factoid of an otherwise very good read and video that I gleaned from this story. The A380's cabin pressurizes to an atmospheric equivalent to 5000'. This is a much higher pressure than the usual 8000' that most cabins pressurize to. Since I've lived at 6000' for many years, this means that flying the A380 would actually be a treat, no jet lag or dehydration, and my ears would pop minimally.

Looks to be a very nice flight, but mainly for international purposes at this point. It doesn't seem any domestic routes will be using planes the size of the A380 for a very long time.

Spammer That Sued Spamhaus Now Sued for Spamming

2007-03-25T09:40:00.001-06:00

Spammer That Sued Spamhaus Now Sued for Spamming:

There is justice after all....

Excerpt:
Dave Q. Lintard writes with a link to The Register's coverage of a suit against the spammer that sued Spamhaus. e360 Insight, as the company is known, is accused of using a botnet and compromised headers to get their 'advertising' into the mailboxes of the claimant. These are also the folks that tried to get the Illinois courts to suspend SpamHaus's domain registration when they wouldn't play by e 360's rules. 'e360 Insight sued Spamhaus after the anti-spam organisation blacklisted its domains over alleged spamming. In a default ruling made by an Illinois court in September 2006, Spamhaus was ordered to pay $11.7m in compensation to e360 Insight, pull the organisation's listing, and post a notice stating that it was wrong to say e360 Insight was involved in sending junk mail. UK-based Spamhaus did not defend the case and the ruling was made in its absence.'

DMCA Creator Admits Failure, Blames RIAA

2007-03-25T09:39:00.001-06:00

DMCA Creator Admits Failure, Blames RIAA:

The DMCA, the piece of legislation responsible for limiting our digital freedoms to work with data and reverse engineer proprietary systems has been lamented by its very own creator it seems. Compaq entered the PC market and became a global force that drove our technology forward by doing something in its day that is illegal now. Hopefully the democratic congress can show some balls and repeal some of this garbage. However, the new congress it seems is spineless.

Excerpt:

An anonymous reader writes "DMCA architect Bruce Lehman has admitted that "our Clinton administration policies didn't work out very well" and "our attempts at copyright control have not been successful". Speaking at conference in Montreal (video at 11:00), Lehman lay much of the blame at the feet of the recording industry for their failure to adapt to the online marketplace in the mid-1990s."

Rant on the transfer of wealth. Economics

2007-03-17T11:34:00.001-06:00

In reading that article about the Pfizer CEO profiteering from slitting the throats of his workforce I just have to rant a little on the economics of this type of fiscal policy.

Someone at Digg by the name of "SaSpurzFan" made the great point that this type of transfer of wealth is bad for society. I wholly agree.

Let's break it down into two categories of money. You have what are called utility dollars. This is the money circulated by the working class. It pays for food, energy, healthcare, and basic homeostasis for the average family. It is often seldom that after the utility dollars are spent there is very much for "low utility dollars". This is money spent on entertainment, recreation, and things like vacations.

The basic business practice of a major pharmacology company is the removal of wealth from utility dollars and converts that into low utility dollars for their shareholders.

I'd like to take the principle even further. Doctors should not make the money that they do on the basis that their conversion in lump sums of utility dollars into low utility dollars is a huge detriment to America. A physician uses their buying power to go far above and beyond basic homeostasis at the large expense of a major portion of a working class income. The reason this harms the economy is because the working class further resorts to more conservative fiscal spending to compensate the loss of utility dollars toward other basic needs. With low utility dollars being less utilized.

This is why the consumer confidence index is lowered and the markets centered around consumers spending low utility dollars have a generally more difficult time.

The other problem with this is that we continue to act as stilts for the few privelaged. It's turning into a truly bifurcated and uneven society. The few privelaged are not "trickling down" in their spending, instead they hoard it or it becomes a circular support system between themselves and other wealthy in the form of our stock system. It's more and more an aristocracy of an organized few with a self propagating support structure. The problem is also that it's continuing to be at the expense of basic needs choices for many of us.

$11 Million salary, 36% raise and 10,000 fired employees.

2007-03-17T11:16:00.001-06:00

This just irritates the hell out of me. When a patient goes on chemotherapy, those $20,000 per month drugs are not going to R&D as much as they say. If you look at how much the executive officers and employees in the upper eschelons of the company make, you're paying for greed pure and simple. No nobility exists whatsoever in these companies and this just proves it.

read more | digg story

Giant Pool of Water Ice at Mars' South Pole

2007-03-15T16:04:00.001-06:00

Giant Pool of Water Ice at Mars' South Pole:
Mars is unlikely to sport beachfront property anytime soon, but the planet has enough water ice at its south pole to blanket the entire planet in more than 30 feet of water if everything thawed out.

This is actually a pretty cool read.

An idea for physician accountability.

2007-03-14T17:07:00.000-06:00

When you go to a car dealership and get a car your contract is usually pretty cut and dry. When you sign you can see all the fees and terms of your purchase. Now go to a hospital for a surgery and what you sign doesn't agree to any set fee. Granted the human body is subject to many extenuating possibilities than a car, you should still have everything laid out for you.

A doctor needs to own what is done. He or she needs to be accountable easily for what they do during a surgery and explain and be held accountable for it in a way that indemnifies the patient against crooked physicians or just blatant CYA services so that a physician can feel better about the chances of malpractice lawsuits happening.

The real issue is that physicians still do not put patients in the charge of their care. The legalities of it still entitle the patient to full control over their healthcare. The problem is that many doctors lose sight of what will best serve the patient and not what will best serve their liabilities. Many physicians' modus operandi is to manage risk with patient care an afterthought to this one priority. Patients need to manage the risk. It must be up to "us" to challenge things and have a clear understanding of the roadmap of treatment being prescribed to us. Many people do not question what a physician does early on in treatment because the physician paints this picture of a situation beyond the scope of their understanding. Partly true, you can still dig in and find the basics. Simplistically "If I go get this scan, what does it mean with either possible outcome? What test will come after that and what will those outcomes mean?". A physician typically operates off of a flowchart, we need to get that flowchart.

We must have the means to dispute whichever portion we wish.

Granted I understand there are plenty of cases where a patient is incapacitated and needs certain treatment in order to avert death. This is unavoidable and the nature of the business. However, what I'm getting at is physicians ordering frivolous tests or performing things that aren't required. I'd also like to take a stab at the inconsistency of physicians. They "just decide" stuff for no reason sometimes.

Well here's to you doctors living in your self created super star realities. We the people are coming after your lack of business ethics.

Chang'e 1: China Gears Up for First Moon Mission

2007-03-14T16:10:00.001-06:00

Chang'e 1: China Gears Up for First Moon Mission:
China is ramping up for the launch this year of Chang'e 1, a lunar orbiter designed to set the stage for the nation's future Moon-bound missions.

I would just love to see China nudge the US out of its doldrums. Go China!

i,

2007-03-13T16:05:00.001-06:00

Halliburton's Dubai move -- a negative for the dollar:

Article reads:
NEW YORK (MarketWatch) - What's good for Halliburton shareholders, may not be good for the U.S. economy and the dollar.

Oh may not be good for the US?? May not be good?????

I think with just a smidgen of common sense, one can ascertain that a company assraping the federal budget and then high tailing out of the country as a primary business move would definitely be bad for the US.

Halliburton is Moving Their Headquarters from Houston to DUBAI

2007-03-11T17:54:00.001-06:00

Oil services giant Halliburton Co. will soon shift its corporate headquarters from Houston to the Mideast financial powerhouse of Dubai, chief executive Dave Lesar announced Sunday.As one Digg commenter remarked "It really just sucks to have to stand by while they f*ck us in the ass. Rome is falling..."

read more | digg story

'Berserk' house cat sends owner to hospital

2007-03-11T07:30:00.001-06:00

'Berserk' house cat sends owner to hospital:

"A house cat attacked its owner, sending her to the hospital by ambulance with more than 20 bite wounds."

Yep...the french SUCK!

2007-03-10T09:08:00.001-07:00

First Loss Ever at Airbus, and Profit Drops at EADS:
Profit plunged 94 percent at EADS after its main unit, the aircraft maker Airbus, reported its worst year ever.

Apple rumors - someone needs to get real.

2007-03-09T18:17:00.001-07:00

I made this post solely to point out an old Digg story I saw. It was at Digg and I must say some very constructive comments came about there about how pointless it truly is to say Apple is coming out with product X when it's entirely conjecture that's unverifiable.

I bring up this rant because I saw I, Cringely's article about how Apple is supposedly going to launch hardware H.264. While this is entirely plausible, I really don't care. I might find it useful for doing video editing, but in all honesty my CPU's are plenty fast enough for the task. The other thing is that we have no idea where the author got the rumor. Hence I reference the aforementioned link about creating Apple rumors. Cringely may be using this as a ploy to generate traffic, or it may be true. Whatever the case it's asinine. Dell could just as soon launch such technology in a kneejerk reaction to Apple's speculated move (however unlikely...check that...VERY unlikely). So now we're going to see news sites link to this article saying it's news and in turn other news sites call it a verified story which has a high probability of fizzling in the end.

Stop giving this crap such attention, if Apple reverse engineers the entire human genome then great. This is tantamount to inventing a self perpetuated fraud case.

I guess Digg users truly do forget all too quickly, like goldfish.

News: GDC: Intel solves speed problems with integrated graphics

2007-03-08T19:05:00.001-07:00

News: GDC: Intel solves speed problems with integrated graphics:

This has been a long running gripe that the integrated graphics used in Macbooks and Mini's are simply trash. The update to GMA965 will help make the trash less trashy, so that instead of pure garbage it's just a turd.

Here's to hoping Intel will someday just blow our socks off with some revision of integrated graphics.